Dali House

In 1945 Pollock and Krasner borrowed $5,000 from his dealer, Peggy Guggenheim, to buy their place in Springs, Long Island, a former fisherman’s house at 830 Springs-Fireplace Road. He’d had an apartment-studio at 46 East Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and Krasner lived at 51 East Ninth Street. Those stoic buildings no longer exist, but the fisherman’s shack still stands.

The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio is now owned by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and welcomes visitors by appointment. The property is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Pollock piled the bookshelves with the works of Freud and Jung, Faulkner and Joyce, and they’re still there, along with Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong albums and Krasner’s seashell collection.

Some days Jackson and Lee loafed at nearby Louse Point, as did de Kooning, who painted the scene, though you have to squint to recognise it in “Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louse Point” (inset). Below, days at the beach, the couple on their own in about 1950 and flanking Clement Greenberg, an unidentified child and Helen Frankenthaler around 1952. These pictures come from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

June 1950: Art News sends a reporter and photographer to Springs to chronicle Pollock’s creation of a painting, but when they’re ushered into the old barn that he uses for a studio (pictured below), he’s already more or less done (it’s “Number 32, 1950″). Nevertheless he picks up a brush and says, “I’ll pretend I’m painting.”

July 1950: Hans Namuth has a go, arriving on the promise that he can photograph Pollock starting and possibly even finishing a painting. Again, though, the work is already finished when he gets there. But when Namuth sets up to photograph the painting, Pollock grabs a brush and starts working on it again.

He gets to see the Big Dripper at full tilt — “Jack the Dripper” as Time magazine had dubbed him in February — doing his “personalised skywriting”. See the rest.

America’s first deservedly celebrated genre painter, Long Island native William Sidney Mount (1807-68), portrayed the good folks of Setauket, as seen here, and Stony Brook, and in the 1860s Fanny Palmer came out from Brooklyn to harvest vistas for Currier & Ives engravings, and Alonzo Chappel, who lived in Middle Island, depicted the Battle of Long Island, shown below.

In the following decade John Frederick Kensett and Frederick Church helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art so there would be proper place to view the scenes they captured on what Walt Whitman called “the Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine”.

Part 1 of the “Beach Boys” series is here.

Even Winslow Homer of Maine came up with “East Hampton Beach, Long Island”, seen here, and in 1877 he and J Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, William Merritt Chase and Thomas Moran formed the Tile Club to paint decorative tiles — they spent so much time chugging up and down the island on the new railroad and writing about it that a tourism boom was fomented.

Moran decided to move here, as did Chase, who in 1891 established the country’s first outdoor art school in Southampton’s Shinnecock Hills. George Bellows migrated out, then Frederick Childe Hassam, and then, soon after the 1913 New York Armory Show, modern art moved in, beginning with abstract painter Arthur Dove (seen here is his “Sun” from 1943) and his artist wife Helen Torr and, fleeing the rising Nazis, George Grosz, who lived in Huntington.

Fernand Léger stayed with his companion Lucia Christofanetti in a guest cottage on Frank Wiborg’s grand estate in East Hampton, The Dunes, where Sara and Gerald Murphy lived. Léger left, but Lucia stayed, and she coaxed Breton and Duchamp into sampling the island. (The Murphys, too, were magnets for Europe’s artistic elite, but we’ll visit with them in another post.)

“In the dark years of World War II,” Ariella Budick wrote in Newsday a few years back, “a group of surrealists found refuge on the east end of Long Island. Forced into immobility by blackouts and gas rationing, they played chess, bicycled the byways, shocked the locals with their bare feet and, stirred by their serene surroundings, created art.”

She cites Charles Riley, the co-curator of a late-’90s island retrospective called “Dreams on Canvas: Surrealism in Europe and America”: “The first bikini ever worn on Long Island was a surrealist prank executed by a very brave young woman named Catherine Yarrow … She hand-knit an extremely revealing bathing suit. It was part of a surrealist house party.” (Apologies to Paul Delvaux — that’s not really Catherine Yarrow in the picture.) See the rest.

What happens when a painting’s title forgets its place and crawls all over the canvas? Too ambitious to loiter meekly in the little sign card next to the frame, the words decide they’re just as important as the picture, and the next thing you know you have anarchy, graffiti run amok, images and text forming a labour union and subverting the millennia-old conventions governing visual representation.

A detail of Georges Braque’s “Pedestal Table” from 1913.

Pop art made words in paintings commonplace, but its grandfather, cubism, was a sucker for shards of text blowing through the scenery, and its crazy old great-uncle, surrealism, kept scrapbooks of every flitting message scrap, quite sure they would one day all make sense.

Andre Derain’s “Portrait of a Man with a Newspaper” from about 1912.

Pictures and words are natural enough collaborators, of course, both being central to the fine arts, but traditionally they never appeared onstage together. I really don’t want to dig too deeply into this, because there are websites that are quite happy to take you on very long and not particularly interesting strolls along Semiotics Street, returning by way of Semantics Boulevard. In the case of Rene Magritte the University of Washington has an especially heavy-breathing thesis online, but do watch out for words like “intersubstitutability” — you could injure yourself.

Then there’s David Scott’s 2005 essay for Image & Narrative, “the Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative” about the words found in Paul Delvaux’s art, which I found a bit more intesting since Delvaux is a bit more interesting, not least because he was forever painting naked women sleepwalking around train stations. (He also painted a fine “Leda” in 1948, a subject I’ve lately been rattling on about.)

Dali House has also joined the wool-minders pondering the meaning of “Et in Arcadia ego” in Nicolas Poussin’s “The Shepherds of Arcadia”, but that was hardly on the same level as Magritte’s patient experimenting with what exactly it is that words and pictures do, how they do it and how you can pull the rug out from under them.

“This is Not a Pipe”, from 1929, and it’s still not a pipe today. Magritte did a string of variations on this picture over the decades in a bid to expose “the Treachery of Imagery”, ultimately putting the words on a bolted-down plaque so it looked as though the affirmation could never be removed. I think of the image every time I hear David Byrne sing, “This is not my beautiful wife!”

What was Magritte on about? Michel Foucault found a litany of layered possible interpretations in a 1973 book about the pipe picture, one cancelling out another. This picture of a pipe doesn’t make the pipe a pipe, of course, but there’s much more. This painting is not a pipe? Art is not a pipe? If you focus on the words and realise this sentence is not a pipe, suddenly a picture reclaims its dominance over the written word. See the rest.

The Museum Ludwig in Koln, Germany, owns “The Railway Station at Perpignan” from 1965 (detail here), described in the first entry on this biographical tour, as well as works by Lichtenstein and Warhol in the largest collection of pop art outside the US.

The museum was founded in 1976 with a gift of 350 works of modern art by the Ludwig family, also including Russian avant garde pieces and several hundred Picassos.